Practice

SCI-Arc Settles Down in Downtown LA

At 39, the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) is
ready to settle down. On April 21, the school finalized a deal to
purchase its downtown Los Angeles campus—the original Santa Fe Freight
Depot—and adjacent lot. The deal, pegged at $23.1 million, puts an end
to speculation over whether SCI-Arc, which was founded on the concept of
a “college without walls,” will stay in the city’s Arts District.

SCI-Arc,
which has operated out of the Harrison Albright–designed facility since
2001, has long pursued the property’s acquisition. Despite attempts to
purchase it in 2004, the property was sold to Meruelo Maddux Properties,
which later filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Although the
school’s lease had renewal options, questions about whether it would
remain downtown started to circulate after Legendary Investors Group
bought the debt for 10 Meruelo Maddux properties, including the SCI-Arc
site. But a recent deal between Meruelo Maddux and Legendary has
permitted the school’s purchase of the approximately 90,000-square-foot
building that sits on a 4.5-acre lot. Two additional parcels may also
become available to the school, according to Eric Owen Moss, FAIA,
SCI-Arc director and principal of Eric Owen Moss Architects.

Moss
says that the purchase comes at a time when SCI-Arc is emerging as a
more stable institution. As recently as seven years ago, he says, the
school had issues relating to finances and accreditation. Today,
enrollment tops 500, and faculty and staff account for another 105.
Earlier this month, the school announced that Thom Mayne, FAIA,
principal of Morphosis and one of the school’s co-founders, had been
elected as a SCI-Arc trustee.

“It was difficult, initially, in the
SCI-Arc mindset, to imagine a more conservative administration pro
forma,” Moss says. “Where the surprise might be is in the capacity of
SCI-Arc to keep the pedagogy on its edge and keep administration and
finances in the middle.”

He adds that the school’s newfound
stability is also helping with development initiatives. “SCI-Arc now
seems to have the capacity to get grants and contributions,” Moss says.
Under construction is a new Robot House that will feature a multi-robot
platform and will be at the center of a new one-year post-graduate
program, Emerging Systems and Technologies. The project is being
realized through a partnership with Stäubli Robotics and with the help
of a grant from the Fletcher Jones Foundation.

The purchase also
confirms the school’s commitment to downtown Los Angeles. In the time
since SCI-Arc took root in the Arts District, a number of the area’s
industrial buildings have been converted to lofts, and the Community
Redevelopment Agency of Los Angeles has zoned 20 acres near the school
for clean-tech manufacturing.

“SCI-Arc puts students and faculty
in the midst of a changing and socially diverse and complicated world
very focused on rebuilding itself,” Moss says.

Absent from this
world—for the time being—is student housing. The school has no specific
plans for student housing at this time, according to SCI-Arc chief
operating officer Jamie Bennett, but in the wake of the sale it will
actively pursue opportunities for offering housing to its students.

Moss
insists that, moving forward, the school’s biggest test will be what
goes on within the building. He says that though the sale is important
and reinforces the school’s solvency, it doesn’t say much about the
discourse of the school, which DesignIntelligence recently ranked second
in design and computer applications categories in the 2011 America’s
Best Architecture Schools survey.

“The content, what goes on at
the school, matters more than that there is a building,” Moss says. “But
it does take SCI-Arc out of vagabond status.”